Zeus, Protector of Strangers, must be watching over Robert Fagles. Fagles has now ventured twice into the territory of the Homeric poem—a land from which most ordinary translators might never hope to return—and this time he has brought back a fresh, readable translation of the Odyssey. A stronger poem than his much acclaimed Iliad, Fagles’s Odyssey gives us an English Homer that is as compelling to hear as to read—an Odyssey that conjures the sea-surge of Homer’s poetry through the rhythms and workings of English.

Consider the rugged beauty that Fagles achieves at the opening of book eleven, the book devoted to Odysseus’s descent into the underworld:

Now down we came to the ship at the water’s

edge,
we hauled and launched her into the sunlit

breakers first,
stepped the mast in the black craft and set

our sail
and loaded the sheep aboard, the ram and

the ewe,
then we ourselves embarked, streaming tears,
our hearts weighed down with anguish …
But Circe the awesome nymph with lovely

braids
who speaks with human voice, sent us a hardy

shipmate,
yes, a fresh following wind ruffling up in

our wake.

“Stepped the mast in the black craft” vies with Pound’s turn on the same line, and this whole passage exemplifies the forthright dignity and American energy of Fagles’s Odyssey. Here as elsewhere, the translation captures some of the density of Homeric verse while relying on metrical variations native to English. As Bernard Knox remarks in his excellent introduction, Homer’s lines “build up a hypnotic effect in book after book, imposing on things and men and gods the same pattern, presenting in a rhythmic microcosm the wandering course to a fixed end.” Fagles snaps his translation out of the trance and steers a different course: his Odyssey makes its way by rhythms and patterns foreign to Homer, even un-Homeric, but usually no less effective in English for all that.

In other words, Fagles’s Odyssey delivers an English performance of Homer with a dignity, passion, and grandeur all its own. But the poem also succeeds brilliantly in small ways. In describing the fire on Calypso’s island, Fagles shows us “the cedar/ cleanly split and the sweetwood burning bright”; he keeps time with the Phaeacian boys while they “around the ring [stamp] out the beat.” The verse gets tough when the inland forces of the Cicones get tough; and when Odysseus’s crew narrowly escapes the oblivion of Lotus eating, Fagles keeps pace with the rowers: “they swung aboard at once, they sat to oars in ranks/ and in rhythm churned the water white with stroke on stroke.” The seafaring names of the Phaeacians are turned to English: Topsail, Rowhard, Riptide, Seagirt Son of Greatfleet; these are salty dogs and sons of salty dogs. And in a poem where the contrast of the reckless with the prudent is central to the understanding of character, Fagles shows admirable range in fitting speeches to heroes, goddesses, swineherds, and beggars. He can also talk like a lowlife: witness his version of Melanthius’s nasty, abusive speech in book seventeen.

This Odyssey sometimes achieves impressive results even where it is most experimental—in its use of short lines and in its variations on Homeric formulas and epithets. But the results here are mixed. Occasionally, the short lines seem whimsical or prove disruptive. And while varying epithets may portray the complexities of character in particular situations, it also invites unnecessary psychologizing. As for Homer’s formulas, they have a regenerative power in the Greek poem; it is a little disappointing to see them treated in English as if they are mere redundancies. Fagles’s verse makes no secret of its creator’s divided loyalties; the departures from Homer’s lead sometimes don’t pay off. Lattimore, who sticks closer to the letter, can better capture certain effects—such as the horror of the suitors’ hallucinations; but Fagles can usually out-write Lattimore, and he shows mastery of Homeric horror during the wholesale slaughter of the suitors. Indeed, he is on the whole stronger than Lattimore, because he takes more risks.

Only rarely do we discover Fagles nodding, or in moments of weakness. Why, for instance, does he back down from more powerful language when Telemachus in book one expresses skepticism about his paternity? “Who, on his own,/ has ever really known who gave him life?” The English word required to launch the Telemacheia is “father.” Even at this early stage, Homer is preparing the difficult pill that Telemachus must swallow when father and son are finally reunited: “no other Odysseus will return to you.” So Fagles misses his first opportunity to get Telemachus’s story underway. At other moments, he unintentionally loses command not of Homer’s meaning, but of English idiom, nuance, and subtext. So, for instance, the Sirens’ song in Fagles’s version ends, “we know it all.” Always bragging, those Sirens. And there is one moment in Nausicaa’s speech when, despite my best efforts, I hear Eliza Doolittle: “There lies my father’s estate, his blooming orchard too.”

These little lapses don’t detract significantly from the grand experience of this very grand poem. Still, I could wish for more restraint in some places, particularly in the recourse to special typographic effects to do the work that poetic meter should do. Am I the only reader disturbed by such things? Sometimes the lines are arranged to enhance the drama, when I’d rather rely on the poetry and my imagination. There are several places, as in the description of the Cyclops’s “broiling eyeball,” where the fancy page layout doesn’t add a thing. When Telemachus insists on his authority in the household, he needlessly speaks in italics, and pretty soon Antinous and everybody else in the poem is similarly afflicted: “I … you … her … us … she … he.” Italics also disrupt the recognition scene between Odysseus and Penelope. Perhaps the most delicate, touching scene of the poem, this reunion shows the old married couple rediscovering familiar speech, gently teasing and testing the “strange” person each knows so well; it’s unnerving to see Penelope’s tender cunning in this passage reduced to special effects on the printed page.

Don’t get me wrong: Fagles is a very good translator, and he’s also a fine poet; but visual cues and typographer’s doodads don’t make Homer new, they make him newfangled. I was moved by nearly every page of this Odyssey, and I plan to read it again. Or maybe I should have it read to me: that way I can concentrate on the good poetry in which this translation abounds.